Abstract
This essay aims to analyze the meaning of communities in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, a collection of eight short stories. The stories deal with the painful experience each singular character―Vietnam refugees, an American veteran soldier returning to Vietnam, a ghost, victims of war, and so on―had during the war and the post-war. Searching for the meaning of the community in this collection, the essay utilizes recent philosophical ideas and views on community: mostly Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community and Giorgio Agamben’s coming community. Nancy explores the ontological limit of community so that he presents a community where Others ethico-ontologically cohabit without threats of immanence of death and violence. Nancy’s inoperative community can be used to analyze the ontological status of refugees and their community though it lacks clarity for this application. On the other hand, Agamben takes on refugee as an example of homo sacer situated in state of exception. This essay, after the theoretical explanation, closly reads and analyzes three stories from the collection to speculate the singular representation of refugees and their communities.(Kangwon National University)
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